Autorschaft: Eine kurze Sozialgeschichte der literarischen Intelligenz in Deutschland zwischen 1860 und 1930 by Rolf Parr, Jörg Schönert

Abstract

596 Reviews Autorschaft: Eine kurze Sozialgeschichte der literarischen Intelligenz inDeutschland zwischen i860 und 1930. By Rolf Parr with the assistance of Jorg Schonert. Heidelberg: Synchron. 2008. 136 pp. 14.80. ISBN 978-3-939381-01-3. This slim volume sets out to offeran accessible social history of authorship between the years i860 and 1930. In their preface, the authors note how a social history of authorship has increasingly given way to an approach informed by literary theory, and that there is no overview currently available that succinctly draws together economic, aesthetic, and legal aspects ofGerman authorship during the latterpart of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth century. In aiming to fill this gap, Parr and Schonert draw extensively on their own previously published work: an article on authors during the Kaiserreich (1871-1918), and a piece on the professionalization of authors between 1850 and 1920. Realizing the genesis of this book helps explain some of itsoddities. The time frame of 1860-1930 isnever justified in the text,nor is itparticularly adhered to. Following a brief overview of the social role of authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most of the discussion centres on the processes and results of increasing professionalization during the years of the Kaiserreich, the combined focus of the earlier pieces. There is no mention made of any aspect of authorship during the 1920s. Furthermore, although the authors explain that they have deliberately suppressed explicit reference to systems theory,discourse theory, and theory of the literary field in order to enhance the volume's accessibility for non-specialists, thishardly squares with their earlier acknowledgement that theory and practice-focused approaches need to be brought together in order tomake up for past failings within the discipline. Thus the volume remains disappointingly within the scope of a traditional social history of authorship, focused for themost part on the latterpart of the nineteenth century and broadly tracing a number of historically determined stages in authors' changing social status during thisperiod. There are some useful facts and figures here, concerning relative wages at the turn of the century, themany and varied literary bodies and clubs which sought to respond tomarket forces at this time, and, in brief overview, the specific social positions and economic circumstances of female authors, journalists, translators, academic authors, and writers of popular science and children's literature.A short concluding chapter gives an eclectic account of the different kinds of authorial groupings that existed between 1870 and 1918. There are some interesting over arching observations, for example how the connotation of 'frei' in the term 'freier Schriftsteller' oscillates between a celebration of idealistic intellectual freedom and a rathermore practical reference to socio-economic self-sufficiency,with writers' perception of 'freedom' and itsuses apt to vary considerably over the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. But overall this volume is not aiming to contribute anything new, either in terms ofmethodological approach or basic factual material, to the study of authorship. Rather, written in an accessible manner, supported by entertaining passages and pictures from primary sources, and equipped with a useful bibliography for further reading, it is a starting-point MLR, 105.2, 2010 597 for those seeking basic information about the practicalities of authorship as it was experienced inGermany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liverpool University Rebecca Braun Arbeitscredo und Burgersinn: Das Motiv der Lebensarbeit inWerken von Gustav Freytag, Otto Ludwig, Gottfried Keller und Theodor Storm. By Petra Weser Bisse. (Epistemata: Reihe Literaturwissenschaft, 617) Wiirzburg: Konighau sen & Neumann. 2007. 555 pp. ?68. ISBN 978-3-8260-3691-0. How do the protagonists ofGerman nineteenth-century fiction view theworld of work and what role does itplay in the construction of their individual and social identities? These are the central questions of Petra Weser-Bisse's extensive study of the theme of 'Lebensarbeit' in the prose fiction of Gustav Freytag, Otto Lud wig, Gottfried Keller and Theodor Storm. The study explores how these authors' bourgeois heroes are frequently faced with the dilemma of being economically successful and socially responsible citizens, while also remaining true to their sense of selfand theirdesires as individuals?desires which may be in conflictwith wider...